It may be understated by Devialet’s standards, in terms of price and size and power, but the Phantom Reactor 900 sounds like a chip off the old block. While it’s no blunt instrument, its priorities are clear: it came to get down, and to jump around.

The bass response, from a speaker of this size, is truly remarkable. It digs uncannily deep, it hits tremendously hard, and it loads low-frequency sounds with stacks of detail about texture and timbre.
Taking into account the drivers’ electrical, mechanical, and acoustical characteristics, SAM applies both phase and frequency correction, to match the drivers’ output as closely as possible to the music signal. It also considers the drivers’ thermal and excursion limitations, so that they can be driven hard without risk of damage. If you wonder how so small a speaker can play so loud and go so deep, a key ingredient is SAM.

Other ingredients are the Reactor’s compact, powerful amplifiers. These employ Devialet’s Analog Digital Hybrid (ADH) amplifier technology, in which a class-A output stage operates in parallel with several class-D amps. The class-A amp supplies the voltage to the driver, while the class-Ds do the heavy lifting. Operating under control of the class-A amp, the class-Ds supply current to the driver, maintaining the required voltage regardless of output level. According to Devialet, ADH combines the musicality of class-A designs with the force, efficiency, and compactness of class-D.

For its Phantom models, Devialet has shrunk the ADH amplifier to a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which also incorporates a DAC with maximum resolution of 24-bit/192kHz, whose output directly feeds the class-A amp.
At the back of each Reactor are a Gigabit Ethernet port, an AC connector, a combined 3.5mm analog/TosLink input jack, and a button that can be used to put the Reactor in standby mode, turn it on, indicate status, initiate setup mode, and perform a hard reset. The TosLink input can accept PCM streams up to 24/96.

On the top of each Reactor are five touch controls: play/pause, volume up, volume down, a Link control used in setting up a network, and one that toggles between Bluetooth operation and the optical/auxiliary input and initiates Bluetooth pairing.